Conference, 1999

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The Romantic Response to Modernity: Ambivalent Beginnings / Conflicting Heritage

Looking back over the last two hundred years, the seminar will attempt to trace the passage and transition of ideas developed by the Romantics in their response to the onset of modernity, of a social order at once marked by the revolutionary but unfulfilled slogans of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and the extreme disorientation of life engendered by modern capitalist society.
The ideas that the Romantics evolved in their ambivalent response to a rapidly changing world have sometimes been seen as backward looking, in opposition to the Enlightenment, predominantly nostalgic, in effect anti-modern. The political and social conservatism exhibited by some of them has no doubt contributed to this approach. This conservatism took the form of the glorification of the past, particularly of the Middle Ages, support to reactionary feudal rulers and to chauvinist brands of nationalism. This is not true of all the Romantics. It also needs to be noted that the emergence, influence and specific trajectories of Romantic notions of art, society and politics are closely linked to the respective processes of political and social change in the different countries of Europe. But integral to the Romantic worldview is its sense of the contradictions of the modern era, its critique of the bourgeois social and moral order, and its attempts to evolve a modern aesthetic that could give expression both to the emancipatory claims of the modern age and to the simultaneous experience of disillusionment and disenchantment, of loss, crisis and scepticism.
The Romantic programme of a modern aesthetic, with its privileging of creativity and imagination, its notion of the autonomy and the open-endedness of the work of art, its blurring of the distinctions between genres, its anti-representational conception of language, its emphasis on the fragment and on irony, its problematisation of the subject and its new consciousness of time, set off a spectrum of often radically conflicting processes of development which saw the initial ideas either taken to their final consequence or the metamorphosis of these ideas into quite opposite ones. The Romantic programme, in a sense, found both its fulfilment and its trivialisation in the profusion of artistic, literary, and other cultural forms of the 20th century including those of popular culture.
The seminar will look at the trajectory of the complex set of notions comprising the Romantic worldview through an analysis of texts, theoretical positions, philosophical ideas, historical and political developments over the past two hundred years.

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PROGRAM

Tuesday, 6 April 1999, Room 22, Arts Faculty, University of Delhi

Wednesday, 7 April 1999, Room 22, Arts Faculty, University of Delhi

Thursday, 8 April 1999, Room 22, Arts Faculty, University of Delhi

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